Nah, Kaye - as she is best known in local literary and fundraising circles - is retiring. And, rather than sitting home and atrophying, she really is, as so many people finishing careers only threaten to do, going to travel.

"We've done a lot in 14 years," Lenox said during a recent interview at the exquisitely restored Monte Vista home that serves as the library foundation's offices. "We sure haven't done a lot of slacking off."

It's surprising that the term "slacking off" is even in the energetic Lenox's vocabulary.

"She is extremely intelligent, thoughtful and creative - the perfect recipe for a genius in the development world," says Kye Fox, former board chairwoman of the foundation. "I actually hired Kaye when I was chair, and I became very dependent on her. We'd come up with all these wild ideas, and Kaye would quietly put them together in some understandable and workable form and bring them back to us, gelled. She never gets ruffled. And she listens, which is refreshing. I can't tell you how much I admire and love her."

Since she took over as president of the nonprofit foundation a decade and a half ago, Lenox and her small staff have not only raised a lot of money for the city's library system, which, not incidentally, has grown by six branches over those years, she has adeptly responded to changes in libraries and the populations they serve.

"Libraries are reinventing themselves," she says.

During a three-day international summit here in May 2008, representatives of libraries in England, China, South Korea and Colombia met to discuss the present and future of what were once just repositories for books.

"Some countries are using their library system to promote economic development," she says, explaining that Colombia won a Gates Innovation Award for its concept of "library parks" that include clinics and art studios and performance facilities.

"They even had their own youth orchestras," she said. "Communities began developing around their libraries."

Our libraries haven't progressed that far, but Lenox says they are "headed in that direction." San Antonio's new libraries now follow the Semmes branch "prototype": In addition to books and other media, they have Wi-Fi, playgrounds, walking trails and outdoor gathering spaces.

"The new libraries are meeting places for people and for ideas," Lenox says. "They're the resource for research, with the information we need to be entrepreneurs. Libraries are in transformation. They have one foot in the print world and one foot in the digital world, but you know which way they are facing."

Founded in 1983 by then-Mayor Henry Cisneros as a vehicle to leverage federal funds for the city, the library foundation is in the business of fundraising and advocacy.

"We've always been there to bring money and friends into the library system," Lenox says. "How we do that has become much more sophisticated, especially with the economy the way it is. I'm the salesman and cheerleader."

On her watch, Lenox and her second-in-command, Tracey Ramsey Bennett, who will take over for Lenox, have established "four or five" endowments totaling $3 million for various library missions, from technology to children's books.

"And these are permanent corpus," she says, getting a puzzled look. "They will last forever."

In other words, you can't touch the principal. The foundation gives more than $100,000 a year to the libraries primarily through the endowments.

And if a branch wants to, say, purchase new computers, staff goes to the foundation, which will seek funding sources and write grants. Grants generated by the foundation total about $1 million to $1.5 million a year.

Lenox points out that when she came on board at the foundation in 1998, the city's allocation for libraries was $19 million. Last year, it was $33 million.

"That's one of our major missions," she says, "advocating with city leaders to increase the budget."

Other programs Lenox is especially proud of are Born to Read, which puts books in the hands of parents of newborns; a public art program that has resulted in the installation of works by international artists Dale Chihuly and Fernando Botero at Central Library; and the Better Futures scholarship program, which helps pay for library staff to earn master's degrees.

"We are creating a pipeline for library leadership," she says. "And we're starting to see staff assuming management roles in the branches."

Lenox, 67, says many of the programs she initiated are running smoothly or winding down, and "it just seems like a good juncture" to call timeout.

"I never planned to be here this long," says Lenox, who taught school in the Northside district for 18 years before retiring when her now-grown son was born. He led her to volunteering and fundraising for the Children's Museum, which in turn led to the library foundation.

"I've had three really wonderful careers," she says. "It's interesting how they all overlay. It's everything I believe in: kids and education."